In The Temp Economy, People Are Staying In Jobs For Longer

Somewhere in a vaguely-unimaginable past, we like to believe it was reasonable for young people to enter a company early in their career and stay for their entire working lives.

That time is long gone, right? In today’s high-tech, ever-changing, freelancer-friendly economy of temps, interns, casual staffers and part timers, the average time spent in a single job must be shorter than ever. Right?

“Career-long jobs never existed for most workers,” wrote Craig Copeland, the EBRI’s senior research associate and author of the report. “Historically, most workers have repeatedly changed jobs during their working careers, and all evidence suggests that they will continue to do so in the future.”

While the overall median tenure for everyone has risen, the graph above shows the really noticeable shift has been with women, whose tenure in jobs has risen upward fast, at the same time that men’s inched downward.

And just as the gap between men and women closed, the gap between public and private sector workers got even wider. Since 1983, tenures in the private sector have risen by 20%; they rose 40% in the same period for the public sector.

The rising tenures might go against the generally held narrative that long-term employment is becoming even more fragile, but interpreting what these numbers mean requires some nuance, as the report concludes:

While the tenure levels presented in this article show that job stability has remained relatively constant over the past two decades, these data do not measure job security. For instance, an increase in workers’ median tenure may be interpreted to mean that job security has declined because those with shorter tenures have been let go and no longer have jobs, leaving the longer-tenured workers less secure. Or the median tenure could decline when workers feel more secure, have an increased ability to find other employment, and switch to better jobs. Conversely, workers who feel more secure in their current jobs may not be motivated to switch employers due to their security, which could lead to a higher median tenure. Consequently, although tenure is not a good measure of job security, it does provide insight into how long workers choose to or are allowed to remain with their current employers. These ideas are particularly relevant in the most recent years as unemployment has remained high in 2009–2012, but median tenure levels have increased in 2012. Therefore, it appears that workers who have been at their jobs five or more years are mostly staying in them, while those with less than five years of tenure are the ones in new jobs, as the percentage of workers with one year or less of tenure increased in 2012 and those with one to four years of tenure declined.